Over the past several years, social policy research and initiatives in the United States have been framed less around the need to alleviate poverty and disadvantage, and more around an imperative to promote upward mobility. This shift owes, among other factors, to the groundbreaking research of Raj Chetty and colleagues, which spotlights the relatively low levels of upward mobility experienced by many groups in America, especially African-Americans and those growing up in poor neighborhoods.

As with Chetty’s research, most of these efforts focus on how children who grow up in lower-income households can overcome the barriers that often stand in their way of accessing the middle class, such as lack of quality child care, housing instability, unsafe neighborhoods, low-performing schools, and difficulty affording and succeeding in higher education.

While such strategies are critical to ensuring better opportunities for the next generation, they have less to offer the tens of millions of struggling adults—many of them parents to these children—who are already in the labor market, or will be soon. As economist David Autor shows, decent-paying jobs for workers without college degrees have been disappearing for decades, and most of those workers end up in low-paid occupations. In this sense, we need to pair a burgeoning agenda to promote intergenerational economic mobility with one focused on improving intragenerational mobility.

On that count, Opportunity Industries, a recent report by my colleagues Chad Shearer and Isha Shah, provides valuable new insight. They examine more than 25 years of data to identify places in the labor market that provide non-college workers with a better shot at reaching the middle class. Their findings point to three things that influence upward mobility opportunities for these workers.

Your occupation matters

In America’s large metropolitan areas today, only 20 percent of workers without college degrees possess what Shearer and Shah label “good jobs”—those in which workers earn better-than-average wages for their local community, and have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. Another 13 percent work in what the authors call “promising jobs,” which do not provide good pay and benefits, but do have a track record of helping their occupants reach a good job within 10 years. That leaves roughly two in three non-college workers in what the authors call “other jobs,” but which one might less charitably call, “bad jobs.”

Not surprisingly, some fields provide greater access to good and promising jobs for non-college workers than others. Your odds of having a good job are better if you work in maintenance occupations (say, as an HVAC technician) than if you work in personal care occupations (say, as a ticket booth attendant at a movie theater).

What’s more revealing, though, is that pathways to middle-class jobs most often involve switching occupations. Roughly three-quarters of workers without college degrees predicted to get a good job in the next decade will make a major career switch along the way (Figure 1). Many of these people begin their working lives in fields like retail and food service, but use what they learn in these “starter fields” to move into better-paying careers. For instance, nearly four in ten non-college workers who switch out of lower-paying facilities occupations (e.g., janitors, groundskeepers) move into better-paying jobs in construction, maintenance, or production.

Your industry matters

What you do for a living, and the sector of the economy in which you do it, are often two different things. People working in office and administrative support jobs, for instance, are spread almost evenly across the financial services, government, and retail industries.

Some industries provide non-college workers with a better shot at landing good jobs. Many blue-collar industries like manufacturing, logistics, and wholesale trade are what economists call “tradable” industries, those that face stiffer competition because they sell most of their products and services to customers outside their local market (Figure 2). The same is true of several white-collar sectors like information and professional services, which still provide many jobs to workers without bachelor’s degrees.

Other industries that mostly serve customers in their local marketplace don’t offer as many good jobs for non-college workers, but do provide many promising jobs. In food service, retail, and administrative services, many people gain the skills that enable them to climb the ladder in those sectors, or more frequently, jump to another better-paying industry. Customer service representatives in the utilities sector, for instance, tend to receive much higher pay than their counterparts in the health care sector.

Your location matters

Finally, Shearer and Shah note that these mobility dynamics vary greatly across local labor markets. Good and promising jobs held by non-college workers represent 31 percent of all jobs in the El Paso area, versus less than 18 percent in Houston, despite the fact these metro areas are both in Texas (Figure 3). Certainly, the education levels of local populations influence these dynamics; a higher share of El Pasoans than Houstonians lack a college degree.

But metropolitan areas’ specific occupational and industry structures also influence opportunity for these workers. For example, manufacturing is a significant part of the local economy in both Tucson, Ariz. and Stockton, Calif., but non-college manufacturing workers in Tucson (who tend to work in higher-skill aerospace jobs) are nearly twice as likely to have a good job as their counterparts in Stockton (who tend to work in lower-skill food and beverage production jobs).

What it means for improving workers’ mobility

Unfortunately, no metro area has enough good and promising jobs for all its workers. But smarter public policies at the local and regional levels can help narrow the gap between demand and supply. A couple implications stand out.

First, workforce development activities should do more to support worker mobility. Leading approaches in recent years have focused on meeting employer needs and building career pathways within single sectors, such as health care, manufacturing, and retail. Routes to the middle class, however, more often traverse industries than operate within them. With data on these real-world pathways, and greater focus on providing people with the skills to learn continuously on the job, local agencies can better prepare workers to navigate an increasingly tumultuous labor market toward a good-job destination.

Second, economic development officials should focus their programs and services on good jobs for the workers who need them most, rather than cultivate only the highest-paying jobs or—even worse—throw public money at bad jobs. In providing business incentives and supports, economic developers should consider factors including skill requirements, wages and benefits, and physical accessibility to ensure that the jobs they attract and retain truly help build a stronger local middle class.

In the end, creating and connecting today’s workers to good middle-class jobs can help boost their kids’ long-term prospects, spurring greater intergenerational mobility in the American economy.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2019.01.15_metro_berube_upward-mobility-pathways-related1.jpg?w=270By Alan Berube
Over the past several years, social policy research and initiatives in the United States have been framed less around the need to alleviate poverty and disadvantage, and more around an imperative to promote upward mobility. This shift owes, among other factors, to the groundbreaking research of Raj Chetty and colleagues, which spotlights the relatively low levels of upward mobility experienced by many groups in America, especially African-Americans and those growing up in poor neighborhoods.
As with Chetty’s research, most of these efforts focus on how children who grow up in lower-income households can overcome the barriers that often stand in their way of accessing the middle class, such as lack of quality child care, housing instability, unsafe neighborhoods, low-performing schools, and difficulty affording and succeeding in higher education.
While such strategies are critical to ensuring better opportunities for the next generation, they have less to offer the tens of millions of struggling adults—many of them parents to these children—who are already in the labor market, or will be soon. As economist David Autor shows, decent-paying jobs for workers without college degrees have been disappearing for decades, and most of those workers end up in low-paid occupations. In this sense, we need to pair a burgeoning agenda to promote intergenerational economic mobility with one focused on improving intragenerational mobility.
On that count, Opportunity Industries, a recent report by my colleagues Chad Shearer and Isha Shah, provides valuable new insight. They examine more than 25 years of data to identify places in the labor market that provide non-college workers with a better shot at reaching the middle class. Their findings point to three things that influence upward mobility opportunities for these workers.
Your occupation matters
In America’s large metropolitan areas today, only 20 percent of workers without college degrees possess what Shearer and Shah label “good jobs”—those in which workers earn better-than-average wages for their local community, and have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. Another 13 percent work in what the authors call “promising jobs,” which do not provide good pay and benefits, but do have a track record of helping their occupants reach a good job within 10 years. That leaves roughly two in three non-college workers in what the authors call “other jobs,” but which one might less charitably call, “bad jobs.”
Not surprisingly, some fields provide greater access to good and promising jobs for non-college workers than others. Your odds of having a good job are better if you work in maintenance occupations (say, as an HVAC technician) than if you work in personal care occupations (say, as a ticket booth attendant at a movie theater).
What’s more revealing, though, is that pathways to middle-class jobs most often involve switching occupations. Roughly three-quarters of workers without college degrees predicted to get a good job in the next decade will make a major career switch along the way (Figure 1). Many of these people begin their working lives in fields like retail and food service, but use what they learn in these “starter fields” to move into better-paying careers. For instance, nearly four in ten non-college workers who switch out of lower-paying facilities occupations (e.g., janitors, groundskeepers) move into better-paying jobs in construction, maintenance, or production.
Your industry matters
What you do for a living, and the sector of the economy in which you do it, are often two different things. People working in office and administrative support jobs, for instance, are spread almost evenly across the financial services, government, and retail industries.
Some industries provide non-college workers with a better shot at landing good ... By Alan Berube
Over the past several years, social policy research and initiatives in the United States have been framed less around the need to alleviate poverty and disadvantage, and more around an imperative to promote upward mobility.https://www.brookings.edu/research/advancing-opportunity-in-central-indiana/Advancing opportunity in Central Indianahttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/588089324/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Advancing-opportunity-in-Central-Indiana/
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 21:26:27 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=553555

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By Chad Shearer, Isha Shah, Mark Muro

Promoting opportunity for all workers has become a defining challenge for metropolitan regions throughout the United States, including Central Indiana. In recent years, this region has added jobs at a faster rate than just about any other in the Midwest. At the same time, however, trade and technology shocks have claimed many of Central Indiana’s middle class jobs, leaving some workers and families worse off.

Central Indiana is hardly alone. New technologies and fierce trade competition are rapidly reshaping regional economies throughout the country and the access to opportunity they provide.

This report considers ways in which Central Indiana can advance economic opportunity by focusing regional economic growth and inclusion strategies on “Opportunity Industries”—the industries that concentrate the region’s good jobs and promising jobs. Good jobs provide middle-class wages and benefits. Promising jobs are entry-level jobs that, while they do not provide the pay or benefits of a good job, enable the workers who hold them to reach a good job within 10 years.

The central findings from this report emphasize that Opportunity Industries are a critically important focal point for efforts to expand and support the middle class in Central Indiana:

Central Indiana needs more good and promising jobs than it provides, especially for its workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree. About 264,000 of Central Indiana’s jobs are good or promising jobs held by workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree—enough for only about 35 percent of these workers. Another 239,000 jobs are good or promising jobs for high-skill workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree—enough for 73 percent of these workers. The remaining 524,000, or 51 percent, of Central Indiana’s jobs are neither good nor promising, meaning they provide insufficient pay or benefits and no viable career pathway to a good job. Read more about finding one on page 28 »

Focusing economic development strategies on the opportunity industries that concentrate Central Indiana’s good jobs and can help close its opportunity deficit. Industries that are core to the region’s economy, including advanced manufacturing, professional services, life sciences, and logistics, concentrate the region’s good jobs—for workers with and without a bachelor’s degree— and help fuel its growth through innovation and trade. Adding jobs and connecting workers to these industries can help advance opportunity and prosperity in Central Indiana. Read more about finding two on page 31 »

Preparing workers for good jobs may require new approaches to education, workforce development, and career pathways. Few people who are able to obtain good jobs start in a similar occupation. In fact, 75 percent of Central Indiana workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree will switch between completely different types of occupations to obtain a good job. These career switches are crucial to adapting to evolving labor market demand and should be encouraged through renewed focus on life-long learning, retraining, and career counseling. Read more about finding three on page 42 »

Connecting people to promising entry-level jobs and training programs—especially women and people of color—is essential for advancing opportunity. Education is an increasingly important determinant of a person’s chances of obtaining a good job. Yet educational attainment remains lower among blacks and Hispanics in Central Indiana. Meanwhile, even workers with the same level of education face different chances of obtaining a good job based on their race and gender. Read more about finding four on page 50 »

Addressing the challenges highlighted by this report will require new and coordinated solutions from the fields of economic development, education and workforce development, and from state and local policymakers:

Economic development has an opportunity to bend the region’s growth curve to provide more good jobs by prioritizing opportunity industries.

Additionally, the public and private sectors must work together to improve job quality and career pathways to good jobs.

Current and future workers of all backgrounds need education and training solutions that prepare them for today’s more changeable and dynamic labor market.

Finally, working parents need better supports that make it easier to raise a family while they work to reach the middle class.

Central Indiana possesses many enviable advantages U.S. regions require to achieve inclusive economic growth and prosperity, including its considerable economic momentum and civic capacity. Leaders in this region are already working together to marshal and coordinate these advantages to expand economic opportunity for more workers and families. This report identifies strategies and tactics leaders in Central Indiana—and leaders in other regions facing similar trends—can pursue to address these challenges.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/20181217_Metro_opportunity-ind-indy_related.jpg?w=320By Chad Shearer, Isha Shah, Mark Muro
Promoting opportunity for all workers has become a defining challenge for metropolitan regions throughout the United States, including Central Indiana. In recent years, this region has added jobs at a faster rate than just about any other in the Midwest. At the same time, however, trade and technology shocks have claimed many of Central Indiana’s middle class jobs, leaving some workers and families worse off.
Central Indiana is hardly alone. New technologies and fierce trade competition are rapidly reshaping regional economies throughout the country and the access to opportunity they provide.
This report considers ways in which Central Indiana can advance economic opportunity by focusing regional economic growth and inclusion strategies on “Opportunity Industries”—the industries that concentrate the region’s good jobs and promising jobs. Good jobs provide middle-class wages and benefits. Promising jobs are entry-level jobs that, while they do not provide the pay or benefits of a good job, enable the workers who hold them to reach a good job within 10 years.
The central findings from this report emphasize that Opportunity Industries are a critically important focal point for efforts to expand and support the middle class in Central Indiana:
- Central Indiana needs more good and promising jobs than it provides, especially for its workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree. About 264,000 of Central Indiana’s jobs are good or promising jobs held by workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree—enough for only about 35 percent of these workers. Another 239,000 jobs are good or promising jobs for high-skill workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree—enough for 73 percent of these workers. The remaining 524,000, or 51 percent, of Central Indiana’s jobs are neither good nor promising, meaning they provide insufficient pay or benefits and no viable career pathway to a good job. Read more about finding one on page 28 »
- Focusing economic development strategies on the opportunity industries that concentrate Central Indiana’s good jobs and can help close its opportunity deficit. Industries that are core to the region’s economy, including advanced manufacturing, professional services, life sciences, and logistics, concentrate the region’s good jobs—for workers with and without a bachelor’s degree— and help fuel its growth through innovation and trade. Adding jobs and connecting workers to these industries can help advance opportunity and prosperity in Central Indiana. Read more about finding two on page 31 »
- Preparing workers for good jobs may require new approaches to education, workforce development, and career pathways. Few people who are able to obtain good jobs start in a similar occupation. In fact, 75 percent of Central Indiana workers who do not have a bachelor’s degree will switch between completely different types of occupations to obtain a good job. These career switches are crucial to adapting to evolving labor market demand and should be encouraged through renewed focus on life-long learning, retraining, and career counseling. Read more about finding three on page 42 »
- Connecting people to promising entry-level jobs and training programs—especially women and people of color—is essential for advancing opportunity. Education is an increasingly important determinant of a person’s chances of obtaining a good job. Yet educational attainment remains lower among blacks and Hispanics in Central Indiana. Meanwhile, even workers with the same level of education face different chances of obtaining a good job based on their race and gender. Read more about finding four on page 50 »
Addressing the challenges highlighted by this report will require new and coordinated solutions from ... By Chad Shearer, Isha Shah, Mark Muro
Promoting opportunity for all workers has become a defining challenge for metropolitan regions throughout the United States, including Central Indiana. In recent years, this region has added jobs at a faster ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/12/17/tech-is-still-concentrating-in-the-bay-area-an-update-on-americas-winner-take-most-economic-phenomenon/Tech is (still) concentrating in the Bay Area: An update on America’s winner-take-most economic phenomenonhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/587925604/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Tech-is-still-concentrating-in-the-Bay-Area-An-update-on-America%e2%80%99s-winnertakemost-economic-phenomenon/
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 18:09:15 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=553530

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By Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton

The hope persists among tech and urban optimists for what Revolution LLC funder Steve Case calls “the rise of the rest“—the spread of tech companies into the Heartland.

In fact, recent announcements from Amazon, Google, and Apple—which are adding high-level jobs away from Seattle and the Bay Area—encourage such hope, with their hints that the tech giants are increasingly outgrowing their West Coast roots. Maybe Big Tech really is going to take its incessant talent hunt—and economic contributions—into new places and seed wider-spread economic vitality at a time of economic divides.

So what’s the reality when we look closer? Unfortunately, the story isn’t great, despite the recent news. Building on our last look at tech locational trends from March 2017, this new analysis of job-creation in four key digital services industries—software publishing, data processing and hosting, computer systems design, and web-publishing/search—finds again that while employment in tech is growing all over America, it really isn’t “spreading out” in terms of more cities gained increased shares of the tech pie. To the contrary: By our measure tech has continued to concentrate in a short list of metros during the last few years. The upshot: “Winner-take-most” in tech seems more the rule than the hoped-for “rise of the rest.”

While employment in tech is growing all over America, it really isn’t “spreading out” in terms of more cities gained increased shares of the tech pie.

To be clear, tech remains a compelling contributor to regional growth, and is in fact growing in new places. Digital services continue as a critical part of the national economy, and accounted for fully 80 percent of the nation’s advanced industries growth from 2015 to 2017 as employment grew 4.2 percent a year based on compound annual growth rate (CAGR) calculations.

Likewise, unexpected Heartland metros far from the coastal tech hubs like the Bay Area and Seattle and Boston surfaced as fast-growing tech centers in the recent period. Among the 100 largest U.S. metros, for example, Wichita, Kan.; Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Boise, Idaho; and Orlando, Fla. all posted digital services growth of almost 10 percent a year over the same period. Midwestern stalwarts Kansas City, Mo.-Kan.; Madison, Wisc.; and St. Louis have all seen growth of more than 4 percent a year.

In short, there’s no doubt that tens of thousands of digital services jobs—central to the current artificial intelligence-driven tech boom—are sprouting up in more up-and-coming inland towns and bringing with them growth, hope, good pay, and attractive multiplier effects.

But, even though more cities are enjoying the growth of tech jobs, the sector is in fact concentrating even faster than it was a few years ago. This dynamic may reflect the rising importance of early-stage work in AI and machine learning. Or it might reflect the depressing persistence of groupthink. But at any rate, the numbers are eye-popping.

The top five metros with the highest share of digital services account for 28 percent of all of these jobs nationwide, and the top 10 metros with the highest share of digital services now encompass 44.3 percent of all of these jobs across the nation (based on their national shares of such sectors in 2017). The same top 10 metros captured almost half (49.1 percent) of the new tech jobs created from 2015 to 2017, with eight of these metros—including San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Austin—all increasing their share of the nation’s tech work. Those five metros alone captured 34 percent of all new digital services job growth and increased their share of the nation’s core tech employment by 1.2 percentage points.

Consider further that the super-rich tech folks—epitomized by San Francisco and San Jose—got even richer in the last two years. San Francisco alone added over a tenth of the entire nation’s new digital services jobs (over 25,000), and San Jose increased its share of the nation’s sector by nearly 18,000 jobs. Together, the two Bay Area hubs now encompass 10.7 percent of the nation’s digital services employment, up from 10.1 percent in 2015, 8.9 percent in 2013, and 7.5 percent in 2010. Note too that virtually all of Amazon’s and Apple’s newly announced workforce locations will take place in the biggest 10 of America’s “superstar” metros.

Only a few cities in the rest of the country truly “rose” in the last couple years by expanding their share of the nation’s digital services employment.

Notably, just nine of the largest 100 metros in the nation increased their share of the sector by more than one-tenth of a percentage point. These “winners” of the last few years included San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, Orlando,Kansas City, and Charlotte.

With that said, 31 more cities at least increased their share of the nation’s digital services tech sector, albeit by less than one tenth of a percent. This group was led by Portland, Ore., and included up-and-coming coastal, interior, Midwestern, or Southern centers like Salt Lake City; Atlanta; Charleston, S.C.; San Diego; Nashville, Tenn.; Raleigh, N.C.; Provo, Utah; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Madison, Wisc.; and Greenville, S.C. Although many of these cities made steady progress, they are not significantly increasing their share of the national digital services sector or demonstrating significant competitiveness.

Another 60 cities actually lost share of the sector due to slow or negative growth. This list included numerous larger metros. In this regard, metros with the largest digital services employment share declines between 2015 and 2017 include such hot tech stories as Washington, D.C. and New York (which saw their shares of the national industry slip by -0.3 and -0.2 percentage points) as well as Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas (all of which saw their shares slip by -0.2 points). Washington and New York, of course, needn’t worry too much about the future given Amazon’s recent decision to commence significant hiring for two new “headquarters” facilities. Nevertheless, the large number of places that lost share in the years 2015 to 2017 gives pause about dozens of important U.S. cities.

In short, these new data on the geography of tech are disconcerting for those thinking the U.S. would do better with a more balanced economic map.

Even while tech continues to raise hopes for broad transformation, it is continuing to reflect—and drive—the winner-take-most nature of the American economy.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2018.12.17_Metro_Muro-Whiton_Tech-concentration_Related.jpg?w=276By Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton
The hope persists among tech and urban optimists for what Revolution LLC funder Steve Case calls the rise of the rest“—the spread of tech companies into the Heartland.
In fact, recent announcements from Amazon, Google, and Apple—which are adding high-level jobs away from Seattle and the Bay Area—encourage such hope, with their hints that the tech giants are increasingly outgrowing their West Coast roots. Maybe Big Tech really is going to take its incessant talent hunt—and economic contributions—into new places and seed wider-spread economic vitality at a time of economic divides.
So what’s the reality when we look closer? Unfortunately, the story isn’t great, despite the recent news. Building on our last look at tech locational trends from March 2017, this new analysis of job-creation in four key digital services industries—software publishing, data processing and hosting, computer systems design, and web-publishing/search—finds again that while employment in tech is growing all over America, it really isn't “spreading out” in terms of more cities gained increased shares of the tech pie. To the contrary: By our measure tech has continued to concentrate in a short list of metros during the last few years. The upshot: “Winner-take-most” in tech seems more the rule than the hoped-for rise of the rest.”
While employment in tech is growing all over America, it really isn't “spreading out” in terms of more cities gained increased shares of the tech pie.
To be clear, tech remains a compelling contributor to regional growth, and is in fact growing in new places. Digital services continue as a critical part of the national economy, and accounted for fully 80 percent of the nation's advanced industries growth from 2015 to 2017 as employment grew 4.2 percent a year based on compound annual growth rate (CAGR) calculations.
Likewise, unexpected Heartland metros far from the coastal tech hubs like the Bay Area and Seattle and Boston surfaced as fast-growing tech centers in the recent period. Among the 100 largest U.S. metros, for example, Wichita, Kan.; Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Boise, Idaho; and Orlando, Fla. all posted digital services growth of almost 10 percent a year over the same period. Midwestern stalwarts Kansas City, Mo.-Kan.; Madison, Wisc.; and St. Louis have all seen growth of more than 4 percent a year.
Download the data appendix »
In short, there's no doubt that tens of thousands of digital services jobs—central to the current artificial intelligence-driven tech boom—are sprouting up in more up-and-coming inland towns and bringing with them growth, hope, good pay, and attractive multiplier effects.
But, even though more cities are enjoying the growth of tech jobs, the sector is in fact concentrating even faster than it was a few years ago. This dynamic may reflect the rising importance of early-stage work in AI and machine learning. Or it might reflect the depressing persistence of groupthink. But at any rate, the numbers are eye-popping.
The top five metros with the highest share of digital services account for 28 percent of all of these jobs nationwide, and the top 10 metros with the highest share of digital services now encompass 44.3 percent of all of these jobs across the nation (based on their national shares of such sectors in 2017). The same top 10 metros captured almost half (49.1 percent) of the new tech jobs created from 2015 to 2017, with eight of these metros—including San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Austin—all increasing their share of the nation's tech work. Those five metros alone ... By Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton
The hope persists among tech and urban optimists for what Revolution LLC funder Steve Case calls the rise of the rest“—the spread of tech companies into the Heartland.https://www.brookings.edu/research/opportunity-industries/Opportunity Industrieshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/588089318/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Opportunity-Industries/
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 03:21:21 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=553037

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By Chad Shearer, Isha Shah

In recent decades, technological change and the global integration it enables have been rapidly reshaping the U.S. economy. These forces have improved the potential of some individuals to thrive, but diminished prospects for others striving to reach or maintain their place in the American middle class. Amid these changes, how and where will individuals find durable sources of good jobs?

Certainly, education is an important part of the picture, particularly for enabling upward mobility among young people. But tens of millions of adults who are already a critical part of the American workforce also deserve a chance to obtain better jobs, with higher pay and benefits.

This report shows that the industrial structure and growth of metropolitan economies—in particular, whether they provide sufficient numbers of jobs in opportunity industries—matters greatly for workers’ ability to get ahead economically. It examines the presence of occupations and industries in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas that either currently or over time provide workers access to stable middle-class wages and benefits, particularly for the 38 million prime-age workers without a bachelor’s degree.

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By Chad Shearer, Isha Shah
In recent decades, technological change and the global integration it enables have been rapidly reshaping the U.S. economy. These forces have improved the potential of some individuals to thrive, but diminished prospects for others striving to reach or maintain their place in the American middle class. Amid these changes, how and where will individuals find durable sources of good jobs?
Certainly, education is an important part of the picture, particularly for enabling upward mobility among young people. But tens of millions of adults who are already a critical part of the American workforce also deserve a chance to obtain better jobs, with higher pay and benefits.
This report shows that the industrial structure and growth of metropolitan economies—in particular, whether they provide sufficient numbers of jobs in opportunity industries—matters greatly for workers’ ability to get ahead economically. It examines the presence of occupations and industries in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas that either currently or over time provide workers access to stable middle-class wages and benefits, particularly for the 38 million prime-age workers without a bachelor’s degree.
Click here to download detailed data for metro areas »
Interactive by Alec FriedhoffBy Chad Shearer, Isha Shah
In recent decades, technological change and the global integration it enables have been rapidly reshaping the U.S. economy. These forces have improved the potential of some individuals to thrive, but diminished prospects ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/12/13/what-gms-layoffs-reveal-about-the-digitalization-of-the-auto-industry/What GM’s layoffs reveal about the digitalization of the auto industryhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/585736382/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~What-GM%e2%80%99s-layoffs-reveal-about-the-digitalization-of-the-auto-industry/
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 19:04:37 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=552409

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By Mark Muro, Robert Maxim

News that General Motors plans to cut up to 14,800 jobs in the U.S. and Canada was initially reported as a conventional business-cycle adjustment — a “trimming of the sails.” The main causes of the cuts were understood to be slowing demand in the U.S. and China, slumping demand for sedans, and the need to reduce over-capacity in North America.

And then others focused on the community disruption of plant closings in the Rust Belt and how it might be mitigated.

While all of those perspectives are relevant, the most revealing aspect of GM’s announcement may well be what the layoffs say about broader technology trends. GM’s layoffs are not just incremental but existential, in that sense: They are about accelerating the staffing changes mandated by the company’s aggressive transition from analog to digital products and from gasoline to electric power. As such, the new layoffs (and associated future hirings) are likely an augury of much more disruption coming — in the auto sector, for sure, but also in firms all across the economy.

Central to GM’s announcement is, in our view, what we call the “digitalization of everything.” By that, we mean that GM’s layoffs significantly reflect the talent and workforce strains associated with the diffusion of digital and electronic technologies into nearly every industry, business, and workplace in America.

Specifically, the advent of consumer electronics, IT, electric and battery powered drivetrains, and — soon — autonomy in the automotive industry are placing excruciating new demands on its workforce, and forcing painful change. Where once the auto-sector workforce was anchored by workers responsible for mechanical and machine-maintenance roles, the need for electrical skills is now growing exponentially due to the increasing electrical and electronic content of the car. Likewise, where mechanical engineers once predominated, the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly looking for software engineers, energy management experts, and data scientists able to build electric and self-driving vehicles.

Our recent analysis of the digital content of hundreds of occupations in the American economy shows that the digital content of auto work has soared in the last 15 years, with huge implications for workforce development in the sector. The mean digitalization score of workers in the advanced manufacturing sector, of which auto is a part, surged 60%, from 24 to 39 since 2002. This has reoriented the occupational mix of the industry, changing its hiring needs and layoff decisions. As of 2016, for example, the fastest growing occupations in the auto sector were computer network support specialists and software developers while two of the fastest shrinking were drilling and boring machine operators and sheet metal workers. Similar patterns of cutting and hiring are visible in last week’s announcement.

Nor is that all: Look for more of the same in the future — from GM, and from all other companies in the sector. According to our calculations, employing task-level work assessments provided by the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly 65% of all auto-sector jobs have task-level automation potentials of at least 70% in the next 10 or 15 years, meaning they are potentially susceptible to significant work changes, if not termination. With that said, as one of GM’s statements last week noted, “GM’s transformation also includes adding technology and engineering jobs to support the future of mobility, such as new jobs in electrification and autonomous vehicles.”

In that vein, last week’s layoffs surely were a response to changing near-term market conditions. But beyond that, the cuts went much deeper, to respond to massive, technology-driven changes in the nature of the work at hand.

As to what needs to be “done” about these transitions, the proper response almost certainly bears no resemblance to any of the ideas President Trump offered last week. Trump is fuming at the plant closures, and appears to want to reverse the actions GM is taking to stay ahead of emerging technology and skills changes. To that end, Trump called on GM to close one of its plants in China. And he threatened to strip the company of modest federal incentives to stimulate electric car production. However, that would only hurt GM’s and America’s competitiveness by hindering the company’s plans to invest more in the technology and people needed to produce electric and self-driving cars as those become viable products.

What should be done instead? As a nation, we should be embracing transformative technology and its widespread deployment whether it be electrification and hyper-efficient batteries in the auto sector or automation and AI more broadly. Likewise, we should be increasing our investments in education and workforce training (and re-training), with a focus on digital skills. Only in that way will workers be able to ride out the coming waves of tech-driven staffing changes. And finally, the nation needs to do much more to provide basic supports for people and places struggling with the harsh impacts of labor market change. To be sure, workers must adapt, but firms, governments, and regions all have a responsibility to help.

All of which is to say: GM’s announcement of layoffs last week is much more than a routine course-adjustment by a company alert to market softening after a good run. Rather, it’s a wake-up call about the labor market implications of the “digitalization of everything.”

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2018.12.11_metro_Muro-Maxim_Automation_HBR-related.jpeg?w=270By Mark Muro, Robert Maxim
News that General Motors plans to cut up to 14,800 jobs in the U.S. and Canada was initially reported as a conventional business-cycle adjustment — a “trimming of the sails.” The main causes of the cuts were understood to be slowing demand in the U.S. and China, slumping demand for sedans, and the need to reduce over-capacity in North America.
Then the story turned political, as President Trump lashed out at GM while some observers framed the news as a blow to the president’s promises to bring jobs back to the U.S. heartland.
And then others focused on the community disruption of plant closings in the Rust Belt and how it might be mitigated.
While all of those perspectives are relevant, the most revealing aspect of GM’s announcement may well be what the layoffs say about broader technology trends. GM’s layoffs are not just incremental but existential, in that sense: They are about accelerating the staffing changes mandated by the company’s aggressive transition from analog to digital products and from gasoline to electric power. As such, the new layoffs (and associated future hirings) are likely an augury of much more disruption coming — in the auto sector, for sure, but also in firms all across the economy.
Central to GM’s announcement is, in our view, what we call the digitalization of everything.” By that, we mean that GM’s layoffs significantly reflect the talent and workforce strains associated with the diffusion of digital and electronic technologies into nearly every industry, business, and workplace in America.
Specifically, the advent of consumer electronics, IT, electric and battery powered drivetrains, and — soon — autonomy in the automotive industry are placing excruciating new demands on its workforce, and forcing painful change. Where once the auto-sector workforce was anchored by workers responsible for mechanical and machine-maintenance roles, the need for electrical skills is now growing exponentially due to the increasing electrical and electronic content of the car. Likewise, where mechanical engineers once predominated, the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly looking for software engineers, energy management experts, and data scientists able to build electric and self-driving vehicles.
Our recent analysis of the digital content of hundreds of occupations in the American economy shows that the digital content of auto work has soared in the last 15 years, with huge implications for workforce development in the sector. The mean digitalization score of workers in the advanced manufacturing sector, of which auto is a part, surged 60%, from 24 to 39 since 2002. This has reoriented the occupational mix of the industry, changing its hiring needs and layoff decisions. As of 2016, for example, the fastest growing occupations in the auto sector were computer network support specialists and software developers while two of the fastest shrinking were drilling and boring machine operators and sheet metal workers. Similar patterns of cutting and hiring are visible in last week’s announcement.
Nor is that all: Look for more of the same in the future — from GM, and from all other companies in the sector. According to our calculations, employing task-level work assessments provided by the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly 65% of all auto-sector jobs have task-level automation potentials of at least 70% in the next 10 or 15 years, meaning they are potentially susceptible to significant work changes, if not termination. With that said, as one of GM’s statements last week noted, “GM’s transformation also includes adding ... By Mark Muro, Robert Maxim
News that General Motors plans to cut up to 14,800 jobs in the U.S. and Canada was initially reported as a conventional business-cycle adjustment — a “trimming of the sails.https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-cities/Why rural America needs citieshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/583061106/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Why-rural-America-needs-cities/
Fri, 30 Nov 2018 15:26:18 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=550560

The 2018 midterm elections affirmed that the deep geographic divides within the United States are here to stay. As they did in 2016, Americans living in rural areas overwhelmingly backed Republican candidates, fueled in part by the sense that the American economy is leaving them behind. The plight of rural America, and ideas for its economic revival, continues to animate policy discussions, including among Democrats concerned about their ability to appeal to blue-collar voters.

There are real economic challenges confronting small towns, many of which struggle to add jobs and retain population in today’s knowledge-driven economy. But it would be a mistake to enact policy solutions to save rural America at the expense of cities. Recent efforts to bail out farmers amidst a trade war and exempt rural counties from work requirements to receive Medicaid and other safety-net services in effect hurt people and businesses in cities and suburbs. While these policy moves seem like clever ways to rebalance urban-rural economic divides, they could ultimately harm rural communities, too, by choking off the very engines that make rural investments possible.

In fact, one of the best ways to help rural America may involve helping cities: supporting a distributed network of economically vibrant small and mid-sized cities across the United States.

Why cities matter to rural economies

When looking into urban and rural communities, some context is useful to consider. Many residents in this country, and across the world, continue to move to cities to pursue better lives. Though the fastest rates of urban growth are taking place outside of the United States, America continues to become a more urban nation: Since 2010, metropolitan areas in the United States grew in population by more than 6 percent, while non-metropolitan areas shrank by 0.5 percent.1Brookings analysis reveals that during this timeframe, metro areas with populations over 1 million gained jobs at the fastest rate, while smaller metro areas and non-metro areas added jobs at progressively slower rates, corresponding with their population size. To be sure, rural areas have experienced an uptick in employment in 2017, and within the longer-term trend of rural decline are countless stories of smaller localities that found ways to maintain, and grow, their populations and economies. But the fundamental reality is that more people will live in cities in the years ahead, regardless of any local, state, or federal policy initiative.

Given this, cities matter greatly to rural revitalization, for at least three key reasons.

Prosperity in cities and metropolitan areas effectively subsidizes public investments in rural areas. Nationally, many of the states that receive the highest per-capita rates of federal investment have greater shares of their population in rural communities, such as South Carolina, North Dakota, and Louisiana. Meanwhile, many of the states that receive the lowest rates of federal investment have greater shares of their population in urban centers, including Delaware, Illinois, and Ohio.

This pattern holds for state government spending, too. Studies in Minnesota, Georgia, and Wisconsin reveal that metropolitan areas contribute more to state coffers than they receive in education, infrastructure, and other public services investments. In Georgia, for instance, metropolitan Atlanta provides 61 percent of state revenue but receives just 46 percent of state investment. State spending on roads, broadband networks, schools, and other public services in small town America is funded, in part, by the economic prosperity of cities.

Access to cities—and their markets, specialized industries, and capital—increases rural prosperity. Analysis by our Brookings colleagues Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton suggests that proximity to cities can contribute to rural communities’ well-being due to the spillover benefits that cities generate. Muro and Whiton categorized non-metropolitan counties into ones that are adjacent to a metropolitan area, and ones that are not. While both groups of rural counties experienced job losses between 2008 and 2017, the “non-adjacent” counties fared far worse (Figure 1). Total employment in “adjacent” rural areas declined by 1.9 percent during that time span, but it declined by 3.5 percent in non-adjacent places. In other words, proximity to cities acted as an economic buffer for nearby rural areas, on net, slowing their economic decline.

Another study found that proximity to urban centers improved residents’ optimism about their community’s long-term job prospects. Just 40 percent of residents in these more proximate communities said that they would advise young people to leave for opportunity elsewhere, compared with 61 percent of residents who lived in towns that were farther from cities.

Proximity to cities itself might not be as important as a related attribute: access. Researchers at Headwaters Economics categorized counties in the Western United States into three groups: “metropolitan,” “connected” (defined as rural counties that were connected to the rest of the world through airports with daily service), and “isolated” counties. They found that while “metropolitan” counties performed best, “connected” rural counties had higher rates of educational attainment, population growth, average earnings, and high-wage service jobs, and less income volatility than “isolated” counties did. In other words, the communities that were most closely connected to larger markets did better.

Cities provide opportunities for ambitious rural residents to gain new skills and experiences, benefitting workers and their home communities. As described in Vox, sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas found that some people who leave their rural hometowns end up returning, filling specialized jobs in medicine, law, and other professions using the skills they developed in cities. This phenomenon of “return migration,” popularly referred to as a “boomerang effect,” now animates economic development strategies in several small and mid-sized cities.

To be sure, proximity and access to cities isn’t the sole, or even most important, determinant in a small town’s economic success, as a recent CityLab analysis revealed. Yet these studies reinforce a simple premise. Rather than see rural America as existing in isolation from urban centers, or characterize the two sets of communities as locked in a zero-sum game for economic growth, we should recognize that rural America’s economic success is linked with that of America’s cities.

A network of nearby cities could be better for rural America than a few big “superstar” cities

While city and rural economies retain important, mutually reinforcing linkages, recent trends suggest that the clustering of people, jobs, and capital—known as economic agglomeration—will continue to accelerate into the 21st century. Despite promising employment growth over the past several years, the fact remains that low-density rural areas represent the opposite of what matters in an economy that rewards concentration of knowledge assets. As our colleague Mark Muro notes, the commodity-producing industries that have led to rural America’s recent resurgence, including agriculture, mining, and oil and gas extraction, are not reliable sources of sustained prosperity. Rural communities still have lower shares of residents with college degrees, digital skills, and specialized, knowledge-based jobs, all of which are crucial determinants of durable success in the modern era.

Given market realities and the bleak long-term prospects for many small towns, rural America’s best bet might be to support economic growth in urban centers, including micropolitan areas, and strengthen linkages between urban and rural communities.

Some economists suggest that the United States needs fewer, larger cities. They observe that compared to other developed countries that have just one or two dominant cities (such as London in the United Kingdom, or Sydney and Melbourne in Australia), growth in the U.S. is more evenly distributed. Moreover, larger cities tend to have more productive economies, owing to the benefits of agglomeration. These economists conclude that, because the national economy would grow fastest if more people moved from low-productivity to high-productivity places, public efforts should focus on removing barriers to geographic mobility. They recommend expanding housing supply and transportation options in our country’s biggest cities, and offering relocation assistance for residents in struggling areas.

Policies to make it easier for more people to move to our biggest cities are worth pursuing. But it is not sufficient nor realistic to expect most low-income workers to leave their social networks or afford high-cost areas. A more strategic approach would aim to accelerate economic growth across mid-sized metro areas and micropolitan areas that are accessible to nearby rural areas. Imagine the state of Illinois not just anchored by the Chicago metro area, but by a network of other vibrant communities like Rockford, Peoria, Decatur, and Champaign-Urbana, which in turn offer opportunities for surrounding rural communities. Micropolitan areas like Traverse City, Mich., Corning, N.Y., and Kalispell, Mont. could serve as stronger centers of jobs, finance, and opportunities for rural households. Rather than sprinkle limited resources across every rural county, state and federal policymakers could target efforts to small and mid-sized markets by helping them strengthen commercial corridors and modernize existing industries.

There’s a difference between outmigration from Eastern Kentucky to Southwestern Ohio, and Eastern Kentucky and San Diego, because the former allows you to preserve some social connections, it’s cheaper to move there, it’s less culturally intimidating to move there…if we can regionally develop big cities like Lexington, like Pittsburgh, like Columbus, Ohio, … [it] enables people to maintain social connections even as they move to places with higher employment, and still play a positive role in communities back home.

Put another way, mid-size cities, if they can continue to serve as places of growth and opportunity, are better positioned to offer social and economic benefits to rural communities than distant, high-cost cities.

Investments in mid-sized cities can benefit rural communities and the nation

Beyond the benefits to rural areas, investing in mid-sized cities across America is simply good policy. In an economy increasingly defined by concentration and the coasts, cities themselves are in a winner-take-all competition with one another that is resulting in a nation riven by geographic, cultural, and political divides. Amazon’s recent announcement that its headquarters functions will expand to the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas is merely the latest evidence that the country’s largest markets—and the talent, infrastructure, and amenities they offer—are absorbing the lion’s share of growth while Heartland communities struggle to keep pace.

So what strategies should federal, state, and local leaders pursue to help mid-sized cities grow in a way that benefits rural communities? We believe that four broad approaches would help.

First, restructure economic policymaking to empower communities. Local and regional leaders often have a better sense of what their communities need than state or federal officials. To support economic growth in cities, these officials should provide additional flexibility and resources for smart, cross-sector economic planning at a local scale. States, in particular, have crucial roles to play, and several governors and state legislatures are leading the way on facilitating bottom-up strategies. Under Governor Brian Sandoval, Nevada reoriented its statewide economic strategies toward its regions, establishing regional development authorities, conducting in-depth assessments of industry strengths, and tailoring strategies to regional needs. Virginia passed legislation and new grant programs to facilitate job creation and innovation across the commonwealth through regional collaboration. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam and the state legislature approved a new grant program that incentivizes local solutions to achieve the state’s post-secondary college attainment goals. Other smart policies can help bring stakeholders with diverse viewpoints around a common table to identify key challenges, identify assets to invest in, and ensure that more people benefit from new jobs and investments that result.

Second, align public investments to prioritize homegrown job creation, not recruitment of individual companies. Amazon’s heavily criticized HQ2 search process underscores a reality that more state and local leaders are recognizing in recent years: Public subsidies for business attraction are generally wasteful and not a realistic job creation strategy for smaller communities that cannot compete for headline-grabbing firms like Amazon. Instead, public policies should help small and mid-sized cities promote entrepreneurship and strengthen existing industry clusters where supply chains span urban and rural areas. A report by the National League of Cities demonstrates that efforts to link rural businesses with urban markets can help sustain small town economies, as can be seen through Sacramento’s specialty crops industry cluster. In an excellent essay in Democracy Journal, former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack identifies promising industries that have the potential to lift up rural and urban communities, including bio-based manufacturing and ecosystem markets. When done well, industry cluster strategies can help legacy firms and sectors evolve, adopt new technologies, and be a source of market growth and distinction in an increasingly competitive global environment.

Third, double down on preparing workers for the modern economy by strengthening existing universities, community colleges, and workforce readiness programs. Digital skills are increasingly valued in today’s economy, and places that provide forward-looking educational opportunities to their students will help prepare them for jobs and launch new businesses. Furthermore, research institutions themselves are economic anchors that bring investment and workers into communities. In a post on leveraging research universities to revitalize rural America, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith observes: “In order to compete with the big cities, rural America needs fewer factory towns of 5,000 people and more small university cities of 50,000.”

Fourth, explore new federal and state initiatives to close regional disparities, and maintain existing programs that work. Our colleagues Clara Hendrickson, Mark Muro, and Bill Galston recently wrote about a range of federal policies that could address our current economic and geographic disparities, including new digital skills training, renewed focus on closing broadband access and subscription divides, commuter subsidies, and more. They also advocate for the federal government to maintain funding for existing programs that promote regional competitiveness, including federal R&D expenditures and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. These efforts deserve consideration.

Today’s urban-rural divide has complex political, economic, and cultural facets. Where urban and rural residents agree is that every American should have the opportunity to provide a good life for themselves and their families. Rather than fuel divisions by undermining cities to help small towns, policymakers could embrace a place-based economic agenda that empowers both. Put simply: the fate of rural America relies on cities.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/2018.11.30_metro_liu-arnosti_kalispell.jpg?w=281By Nathan Arnosti, Amy Liu
Contents
- Why cities matter to rural economies - A network of nearby cities could be better for rural America than a few big “superstar” cities - Investments in mid-sized cities can benefit rural communities and the nation
________________________________________________________
The 2018 midterm elections affirmed that the deep geographic divides within the United States are here to stay. As they did in 2016, Americans living in rural areas overwhelmingly backed Republican candidates, fueled in part by the sense that the American economy is leaving them behind. The plight of rural America, and ideas for its economic revival, continues to animate policy discussions, including among Democrats concerned about their ability to appeal to blue-collar voters.
There are real economic challenges confronting small towns, many of which struggle to add jobs and retain population in today’s knowledge-driven economy. But it would be a mistake to enact policy solutions to save rural America at the expense of cities. Recent efforts to bail out farmers amidst a trade war and exempt rural counties from work requirements to receive Medicaid and other safety-net services in effect hurt people and businesses in cities and suburbs. While these policy moves seem like clever ways to rebalance urban-rural economic divides, they could ultimately harm rural communities, too, by choking off the very engines that make rural investments possible.
In fact, one of the best ways to help rural America may involve helping cities: supporting a distributed network of economically vibrant small and mid-sized cities across the United States.
Why cities matter to rural economies
When looking into urban and rural communities, some context is useful to consider. Many residents in this country, and across the world, continue to move to cities to pursue better lives. Though the fastest rates of urban growth are taking place outside of the United States, America continues to become a more urban nation: Since 2010, metropolitan areas in the United States grew in population by more than 6 percent, while non-metropolitan areas shrank by 0.5 percent.1 Brookings analysis reveals that during this timeframe, metro areas with populations over 1 million gained jobs at the fastest rate, while smaller metro areas and non-metro areas added jobs at progressively slower rates, corresponding with their population size. To be sure, rural areas have experienced an uptick in employment in 2017, and within the longer-term trend of rural decline are countless stories of smaller localities that found ways to maintain, and grow, their populations and economies. But the fundamental reality is that more people will live in cities in the years ahead, regardless of any local, state, or federal policy initiative.
Given this, cities matter greatly to rural revitalization, for at least three key reasons.
- Prosperity in cities and metropolitan areas effectively subsidizes public investments in rural areas. Nationally, many of the states that receive the highest per-capita rates of federal investment have greater shares of their population in rural communities, such as South Carolina, North Dakota, and Louisiana. Meanwhile, many of the states that receive the lowest rates of federal investment have greater shares of their population in urban centers, including Delaware, Illinois, and Ohio.
This pattern holds for state government spending, too. Studies in Minnesota, Georgia, and Wisconsin reveal that metropolitan areas contribute more to state coffers than they receive in education, infrastructure, and other public services investments. In Georgia, for instance, metropolitan Atlanta provides 61 percent of state revenue but receives just 46 percent of state investment. State spending on roads, broadband networks, schools, and other public services in small town America is funded, in part, by the economic prosperity of ... By Nathan Arnosti, Amy Liu
Contents
- Why cities matter to rural economies - A network of nearby cities could be better for rural America than a few big “superstar” cities - Investments in mid-sized cities can benefit rural ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/11/19/delivering-shared-prosperity-for-workers-in-a-rapidly-changing-economy/Delivering shared prosperity for workers in a rapidly changing economyhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/581137432/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Delivering-shared-prosperity-for-workers-in-a-rapidly-changing-economy/
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 18:15:38 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=548788

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By Rachel Barker, Alan Berube

In and around Washington these days, think tanks and policy institutions are awash in projects and discussions about the “future of work.” On one side, pessimists suggest that mass numbers of workers could be displaced by robots and artificial intelligence technologies. On the other, optimists point to the historical role of innovation in creating millions of jobs in brand new fields. Amid all that, the trends of sluggish wage growth, an expanding contingent workforce, and diminishing power among American workers prompt continued experimentation and debate around ideas like universal basic income.

Most of the time, however, these conversations don’t include the types of local leaders in business, education, and labor who find themselves on the front lines of responding to these emerging realities. Meanwhile, those leaders grapple with a toolbox of outdated policies and practices ill-suited to the challenges of the modern economy.

As part of a recent public forum hosted in partnership with The Atlantic, The Shared Prosperity Partnership—a national collaboration between the Kresge Foundation, Brookings, Living Cities, and the Urban Institute—convened a panel of workforce experts and employers to discuss ways that local leaders can improve the standing of American workers both now and in the future. That discussion alighted on three practical lessons for these critical stakeholders:

1) Disrupt traditional training models.

Although it still pays to complete a college degree, shorter, more flexible forms of training can also provide opportunity to a broader swath of workers. This will become even more true as employers emphasize specific competencies they are seeking in job candidates, rather than generic levels of educational attainment. “A four-year degree shouldn’t be the marker that separates people that don’t have one to entering those jobs they can perform very well in,” said Plinio Ayala, the president and CEO of the information-technology training organization Per Scholas. He described the importance of getting companies and their human resources departments to be more open to less traditional worker pathways. Per Scholas prepares participants for two IT certifications with 15 weeks of intensive training, alongside coaching, help finding a job, and other resources.

2) Don’t forget soft skills.

Proficiency in discrete competencies aren’t the only factors that weigh in an employee’s success. Lara Shock, senior director of associate experience at Walmart, described how her company emphasizes personal attributes like “attitude” and “will” in recruiting employees before training workers on specific skills. At Per Scholas, learning how to work in teams, manage up, negotiate raises, and other interpersonal skills are also a key component of the organization’s program. These are some of the valuable “human” attributes that robots (as yet) do not possess.

3) Engage employers based on the business case.

As consumers of labor, employers have a real—though often unrealized—interest in collaborating with local workforce leaders to ensure that workers have the skills to compete. In Chicago, two professional services firms, Aon and Accenture, have led the development of a network of local employers across diverse industries offering paid apprenticeships combining work and learning, while helping build a direct pipeline of skilled workers. City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor Juan Salgado, whose system partners with the network, described the “business solution” that this collaboration provides for companies, while also expanding opportunity for a broader cross-section of residents. Salgado was clear that this is not a charity act for companies: “If we cannot deliver business value to you, we’d rather have you not do the apprenticeship program.” Per Scholas’s Ayala reinforced that designing curricula, training, and other elements of programs in close collaboration with companies can also make it easier for graduates to obtain jobs.

Whatever the “future of work” looks like, cities are likely to experience it first. And given the scale of economic change underway, they shouldn’t confront it alone; larger reforms and programs at the state and federal levels over the next several decades must more comprehensively address training needs, job quality, and worker supports. Yet lessons and models are emerging in many cities that point the way toward a future that can better share prosperity among businesses, workers, and communities.

The Kresge Foundation provides financial support to the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

]]>
By Rachel Barker, Alan Berube
In and around Washington these days, think tanks and policy institutions are awash in projects and discussions about the “future of work.” On one side, pessimists suggest that mass numbers of workers could be displaced by robots and artificial intelligence technologies. On the other, optimists point to the historical role of innovation in creating millions of jobs in brand new fields. Amid all that, the trends of sluggish wage growth, an expanding contingent workforce, and diminishing power among American workers prompt continued experimentation and debate around ideas like universal basic income.
Most of the time, however, these conversations don’t include the types of local leaders in business, education, and labor who find themselves on the front lines of responding to these emerging realities. Meanwhile, those leaders grapple with a toolbox of outdated policies and practices ill-suited to the challenges of the modern economy.
As part of a recent public forum hosted in partnership with The Atlantic, The Shared Prosperity Partnership—a national collaboration between the Kresge Foundation, Brookings, Living Cities, and the Urban Institute—convened a panel of workforce experts and employers to discuss ways that local leaders can improve the standing of American workers both now and in the future. That discussion alighted on three practical lessons for these critical stakeholders:
1) Disrupt traditional training models.
Although it still pays to complete a college degree, shorter, more flexible forms of training can also provide opportunity to a broader swath of workers. This will become even more true as employers emphasize specific competencies they are seeking in job candidates, rather than generic levels of educational attainment. “A four-year degree shouldn’t be the marker that separates people that don’t have one to entering those jobs they can perform very well in,” said Plinio Ayala, the president and CEO of the information-technology training organization Per Scholas. He described the importance of getting companies and their human resources departments to be more open to less traditional worker pathways. Per Scholas prepares participants for two IT certifications with 15 weeks of intensive training, alongside coaching, help finding a job, and other resources.
2) Don’t forget soft skills.
Proficiency in discrete competencies aren’t the only factors that weigh in an employee’s success. Lara Shock, senior director of associate experience at Walmart, described how her company emphasizes personal attributes like “attitude” and “will” in recruiting employees before training workers on specific skills. At Per Scholas, learning how to work in teams, manage up, negotiate raises, and other interpersonal skills are also a key component of the organization’s program. These are some of the valuable “human” attributes that robots (as yet) do not possess.
3) Engage employers based on the business case.
As consumers of labor, employers have a real—though often unrealized—interest in collaborating with local workforce leaders to ensure that workers have the skills to compete. In Chicago, two professional services firms, Aon and Accenture, have led the development of a network of local employers across diverse industries offering paid apprenticeships combining work and learning, while helping build a direct pipeline of skilled workers. City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor Juan Salgado, whose system partners with the network, described the “business solution” that this collaboration provides for companies, while also expanding opportunity for a broader cross-section of residents. Salgado was clear that this is not a charity act for companies: “If we cannot deliver business value to you, we’d rather have you not do the ... By Rachel Barker, Alan Berube
In and around Washington these days, think tanks and policy institutions are awash in projects and discussions about the “future of work.” On one side, pessimists suggest that mass numbers of workers could ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/11/15/how-big-could-the-av-industry-be-9-5-million-workers-and-counting/How big could the AV industry be? 9.5 million workers and countinghttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/580435466/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~How-big-could-the-AV-industry-be-million-workers-and-counting/
Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:01:24 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=548284

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By Joseph Kane, Adie Tomer

Digitalization is redefining the American economy for the 21st century, and that certainly applies to the transportation sector. The massive research and development around autonomous vehicles (AVs) has implications for safety, regulation, and the overall business landscape.

Focusing on the technologies alone, though, risks obscuring a critical question: Who will actually create, manage, and maintain AVs, other digital services, and the built environment around them?

Considering how every corner of the country relies on transportation services of some kind, digitalization within the transportation sector promises to upend labor markets everywhere. Understanding the why, who, and where of digitalization’s impacts on the transportation workforce will be critical to ensuring these innovations deliver maximum value for society. In other words, it is crucial to examine the “digital mobility” workforce in greater depth.

Jobs in digital mobility go far beyond drivers

Efforts thus far to illuminate how digitalization will affect the transportation sector have fallen short. The media frequently overstates and oversimplifies the impacts of AVs, resulting in headlines that suggest every truck driver could lose their job. Other analyses tend to focus narrowly on transportation manufacturing or driver occupations, overlooking important segments like construction, maintenance, and logistics sure to be influenced by digitalization. None looks at regional impacts. The result is a distorted picture of national and local labor markets—and an interested public still deeply unsure about exactly which jobs could be impacted.

If digital technologies really will upend our mobility systems—and if that process is only likely to accelerate over the coming decade—then we need to start using a finer touch when it comes to workforce analyses. Recent studies and industry-led partnerships have helped reorient the discussion in this direction, pointing to the extensive number of workers and training platforms implicated by changes in the years to come. Other reports have considered all the various workers where driving is essential to perform their jobs—from childcare workers to personal care aides—with estimates as high as 1 out of every 9 workers nationally.

A helpful start is to focus on those workers directly involved in overseeing and implementing the full lifecycle of automating and digitalizing our roads.

Jobs in digital mobility employ at least 9.5 million workers

To put all this in perspective—to ground what we mean by the lifecycle of automating and digitalizing our roads—let’s start with the people who already work in roadway-related industries and occupations. At minimum, there are millions of workers across hundreds of occupations in every region central to these efforts:

However, the job of actually designing, building, and maintaining all of these new vehicle technologies falls to the wider motor vehicle industry. Employed in motor vehicle and parts manufacturing, automotive repair shops, and wholesale and retail operations, there is a whole set of other assemblers, salespersons, and mechanics that add up to another 3.8 million workers.

But the transition to digital mobility goes far beyond driving and the motor vehicle industry. Workers in transportation-related support industries—ranging from construction laborers and highway maintenance workers, to shipping clerks and logisticians, even surveyors—will all have to manage evolving responsibilities in the digital age. These wide-ranging occupations employ another 1.8 million workers.

All told, we estimate that more than 9.5 million workers across 329 occupations in 2017—or more than 1 out of every 20 workers nationally—are likely directly exposed to changes in their work due to AVs and other digitalization. Most of these workers are not even drivers. Collectively, that means there are more workers in digital mobility than those employed in other sizable sectors like finance, real estate, or administrative services. We’re also not even counting the many people working in computing and telecommunications industries that are leading much of the R&D powering this transportation innovation.

Every state will feel impacts from digital mobility

Yet these national numbers are just a start. Depending on the specific transportation industries and occupations concentrated within their borders, states and localities could feel automation and digitalization at different rates.

What’s certain is that every state needs to be prepared. States with large transportation manufacturing sectors throughout the Midwest and Southeast, from Indiana to Alabama, employ above-average shares of their workers in transportation sectors affected by digitalization (at least 8 percent, compared to a national average of 6.7 percent). Michigan and Ohio, for their part, each employ more than 700,000 such workers.

AV and other digital changes in the transportation sector are about far more than drivers and new car plants. These numbers suggest that no state or region is immune to the labor market uncertainties these innovations are set to unleash.

Charting a new workforce strategy around digital mobility

To manage all this change, public, civic, and private sectors must forge deep, lasting partnerships to prepare the country’s workforce. Answers to a series of questions are critical to informing that work. For example:

What are the precise industries and occupations involved in manufacturing, designing, operating, and maintaining these emerging digital technologies? Which of those occupations don’t exist today, and how many can we expect to emerge as governments and businesses deploy new technologies at greater scale? On the flip side, which jobs are most likely to disappear?

What skills, knowledge, and training are needed for shrinking, stable, and growing positions? How can workforce development systems help new and existing workers manage this digital transition in years to come?

Where—and how—should state and local leaders focus their workforce development efforts to seamlessly integrate these technologies and support economic opportunity? What new kinds of programs must be created, and what institutions—existing or new—should deliver them?

Nothing about the rise of automated and digital technologies suggests American roadways will be any less central to economic life in the coming decades. But we can’t spend all our time focusing on the technologies themselves or how we redesign roads and places to manage these new services. We’ve got to get our workers ready for when the technological hype becomes daily reality, and that starts with defining the specific careers in this space, emphasizing the needed skills and training, and targeting workforce development efforts at a regional scale.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/2018.11.15_metro_AV-industry_Kane-Tomer_related.jpg?w=270By Joseph Kane, Adie Tomer
Digitalization is redefining the American economy for the 21st century, and that certainly applies to the transportation sector. The massive research and development around autonomous vehicles (AVs) has implications for safety, regulation, and the overall business landscape.
But AVs are just one component of the rapid digitalization of our mobility systems. New data and telecommunications systems, new transportation and urban designs, and new pilot programs from car-sharing to scooters are all part of this tectonic shift in how we get around.
Focusing on the technologies alone, though, risks obscuring a critical question: Who will actually create, manage, and maintain AVs, other digital services, and the built environment around them?
Considering how every corner of the country relies on transportation services of some kind, digitalization within the transportation sector promises to upend labor markets everywhere. Understanding the why, who, and where of digitalization’s impacts on the transportation workforce will be critical to ensuring these innovations deliver maximum value for society. In other words, it is crucial to examine the “digital mobility” workforce in greater depth.
Jobs in digital mobility go far beyond drivers
Efforts thus far to illuminate how digitalization will affect the transportation sector have fallen short. The media frequently overstates and oversimplifies the impacts of AVs, resulting in headlines that suggest every truck driver could lose their job. Other analyses tend to focus narrowly on transportation manufacturing or driver occupations, overlooking important segments like construction, maintenance, and logistics sure to be influenced by digitalization. None looks at regional impacts. The result is a distorted picture of national and local labor markets—and an interested public still deeply unsure about exactly which jobs could be impacted.
If digital technologies really will upend our mobility systems—and if that process is only likely to accelerate over the coming decade—then we need to start using a finer touch when it comes to workforce analyses. Recent studies and industry-led partnerships have helped reorient the discussion in this direction, pointing to the extensive number of workers and training platforms implicated by changes in the years to come. Other reports have considered all the various workers where driving is essential to perform their jobs—from childcare workers to personal care aides—with estimates as high as 1 out of every 9 workers nationally.
A helpful start is to focus on those workers directly involved in overseeing and implementing the full lifecycle of automating and digitalizing our roads.
Jobs in digital mobility employ at least 9.5 million workers
To put all this in perspective—to ground what we mean by the lifecycle of automating and digitalizing our roads—let’s start with the people who already work in roadway-related industries and occupations. At minimum, there are millions of workers across hundreds of occupations in every region central to these efforts:
- If we only counted workers employed across seven different “driving” occupations—including school bus drivers; transit bus drivers; drivers/sales workers; heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers; delivery services drivers; taxi drivers; and ambulance drivers—the potential employment impacts would stand at 3.9 million in 2017.
- However, the job of actually designing, building, and maintaining all of these new vehicle technologies falls to the wider motor vehicle industry. Employed in motor vehicle and parts manufacturing, automotive repair shops, and wholesale and retail operations, there is a whole set of other assemblers, salespersons, and mechanics that add up to another 3.8 million workers.
- But the transition to digital mobility goes far ... By Joseph Kane, Adie Tomer
Digitalization is redefining the American economy for the 21st century, and that certainly applies to the transportation sector. The massive research and development around autonomous vehicles (AVs)https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/the-promise-of-community-colleges-as-pathways-to-high-quality-jobs/The promise of community colleges as pathways to high-quality jobshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/580235742/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~The-promise-of-community-colleges-as-pathways-to-highquality-jobs/
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 22:13:34 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=podcast-episode&p=548027

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By Elizabeth Mann, Martha Ross, Adrianna Pita

In this episode, Martha Ross, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Elizabeth Mann Levesque, fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy, discuss the important role that community colleges play in putting young adults on a pathway to higher-quality jobs and other strategies for improving economic outcomes for youth from lower-income and disadvantaged backgrounds.

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By Elizabeth Mann, Martha Ross, Adrianna Pita
In this episode, Martha Ross, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Elizabeth Mann Levesque, fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy, discuss the important role that community colleges play in putting young adults on a pathway to higher-quality jobs and other strategies for improving economic outcomes for youth from lower-income and disadvantaged backgrounds.
Show notes:
- Pathways to high-quality jobs for young adults - Improving community college completion rates by addressing structural and motivational barriers - Event: Pathways to high-quality jobs for young adults - How work-based learning connects students with mentors and experience - States equip employers to drive apprenticeship
Direct download this episode (mp3)
With thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Chris McKenna, Brennan Hoban, Fred Dews, Camilo Ramirez, and interns Churon Bernier and Tim Madden for additional support.
Listen to Intersections here, on Apple Podcasts, or now on Spotify. Send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.
Intersections is part of the Brookings Podcast Network. By Elizabeth Mann, Martha Ross, Adrianna Pita
In this episode, Martha Ross, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Elizabeth Mann Levesque, fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy, discuss the important https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-amazon-was-always-going-to-pick-a-major-city-for-hq2/Why Amazon was always going to pick a major city for HQ2http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/580219724/0/brookingsrss/topics/competitiveness~Why-Amazon-was-always-going-to-pick-a-major-city-for-HQ/
Wed, 14 Nov 2018 20:40:01 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=article&p=548081